Erin East and Adam Meisenheimer

Westside members Erin East and Adam Meisenheimer discuss their personal journeys of grief and the healing they found through the national program, Grief Share. Both Erin and Adam experienced profound losses during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—Erin losing her father to COVID and Adam losing his mother unexpectedly.

The conversation delves into how Grief Share provided them with crucial support and tools to process their grief, leading them to later facilitate their own Grief Share groups at Westside and throughout Atlanta. They share the emotional and spiritual challenges they faced, including the isolating nature of grieving during a pandemic, and how the program allowed them to connect with others experiencing similar loss.

If you are experiencing loss or know someone that needs a grief resource, connect with Grief Share via griefshare.org. Atlanta Westside has a Grief Share seminar coming up on Nov 16, 2024—awpc.church/GriefShare for more info.

Episode Transcript

Anne:

Hey, my name is Anne Henninger, and today I'm in the studio with my husband, Walter.

Walter:

Hello.

Anne :

And our friends Adam Meisenheimer.

Adam:

Hello

Anne :

And Erin East.

Erin:

Hi.

Anne:

So Adam and Erin, please introduce yourselves so we can know you a little bit.

Adam:

So I've been a member here at Atlanta Westside for about seven years. Married to Laura Beth. I have three girls, Margot, 18 months, Grace, three-year-old, and Kate, she'll be five in June. I'm a project manager at Chick-fil-A in their supply chain. And then outside of work, love to spend time with my family, work out, run, outdoors, anything in the yard. So, this is kind of a fun time for me as everything is greening up.

Anne:

Erin, what about you?

Erin:

I'm Erin East. I have been at Westside for about four years now. So I started, quote unquote, attending early on in the pandemic. I live nearby with my dog, Twilly. So if you're ever walking in Underwood Hills and you see a little white fluffy dog barking at you from the window, that might very well be him.

Adam:

I remember doing the Westside one-on-one new member seminar in a tent in our parking lot with Erin. Yeah, and I thought you were 24.

Erin:

Oh, that makes me feel great.

Adam:

26, at least.

Erin:

Adam, I like you a lot, but I really love your wife because she has helped mend me back into shape in many ways as a physical therapist.

Adam:

Yes, and same. She's taking care of both of us. She's put needles in my knees and electric shocks and all kinds of torture devices that make me a better man.

Anne:

As we transition into grief, I know this might be more challenging to talk about, but I think it's helpful to understand a little bit of your story, if y'all don't mind sharing how you were first acquainted with grief.

Erin:

There's no doubt the most profound loss I think I've ever experienced actually came not long after I started attending Westside late in 2020. My biggest fear during the pandemic, early days of the pandemic was that my parents would get sick. Both of them had certain health conditions that put them in the high-risk category for COVID. In October 2020, I learned that they had both come down with COVID, ended up taking both of them to the ER at different times. Thankfully, my mom made a full recovery, no known lasting effects from that, but my dad passed away from COVID the day before Thanksgiving in 2020, after being in the hospital for several days.

Adam:

That relationship with the Lord has it helped me in my grief and I'm thankful for that foundation when I did experience loss. In March of 2020, my mom unexpectedly passed away two days before her 64th birthday. She was young. There was no warning of something that would lead to death. One day I had a mom and then suddenly the next day I didn't, when my brother found her lifeless on the floor at her home. She recently had a pretty routine back procedure and was at home recovering from that, and it appears she was trying to get some pain relief in the middle of the night and accidentally overdosed on pain pills.

Erin:

Man, that's hard.

Anne:

Both of your stories, there's such an added element of grief from all the challenges that came from not being able to be with loved ones in hospitals or all that social distancing in those early times.

Walter:

Yeah. Was that part of the struggle when your dad was in the hospital just having limited access to him as well?

Erin:

We were fortunate to be able to see him before he passed away, to be there when they took him off the ventilator. But it was a lot of phone calls and we sort of forget how chaotic things were. Hospitals were overrun, the ICU was full, and even just the background of it because I couldn't get away from it. After he passed away, you turn on the TV and all the news stories are about COVID.

Anne:

Well, and Adam too, just inferring what you said too about having daughters. I know that the timing, I'm sure matches that two of your daughters at least don't know your mama. How has that impacted you?

Adam:

I was a true mama's boy. She meant everything to me, so it struck me hard and deep. My daughter, Kate, was 10 months old at the time, so I knew that she and God willing other children to come would never know one of the most important people in my life. So yeah, I was completely devastated to say the least and really struggled to sleep, do work, really anything other than cry and shout out to God for help.

Walter:

And that also was in the early days of the pandemic too. How did that context affect what your grieving was like?

Adam:

Yeah, the one time where you wanted to be surrounded by others and instead you had to distance from them. I had a lot of friends and co-workers reach out to me, Chick-fil-A has a daily prayer request that they send out, which is amazing. First I think people, if you've never really experienced grief, sometimes don't really know how to relate to you. And then also you have a pandemic where people are doing their own thing, watching out for their own families, which is understandable, something we've never experienced before.

Anne:

So, how did you all get connected with Grief Share then? I'm curious.

Erin:

Anne, you actually connected me to Grief Share as I think is the case with a lot of people at Westside.

Anne:

I had suggested that, I didn't know if I was the one that introduced you.

Erin:

Yeah, I remember actually at some point, Anne took over as my point of contact when my dad was in the hospital. And I don't know that we had really even had a conversation other than that one conversation at Westside 101. And I remember you were just so gracious in responding to my stream of consciousness text about what was happening. When my dad died, I was just completely shattered. I had a good relationship with him. He was a good dad. He was always very kind and supportive. I just really wasn't prepared for this, but just mentally, physically, emotionally, I could not operate on the same level. I'm not usually the one to join a support group or something like that, but I just knew I needed help. When you mentioned Grief Share, I said, "Yeah, let me look that up. Let me see what resources they have." And I initially signed up for their daily emails and then Westside ended up offering a Grief Share class a couple months later. So, I signed up for that as soon as it was available.

Adam:

Yeah, so it'll be very similar to Erin. One of the first things that I did when I lost my mom was I reached out to Walter and Anne. And I'll never forget I was on my couch in my living room set up a Zoom call, which again, at the time it was just different times because it was literally the start of COVID. And y'all talked about Grief Share, which I'll forever be grateful for.I, when it first happened, tried to think of family friends that had gone through similar things, trying to find the connection and really just trying to speak to... I went through a whole list of people and trying to find that one thing, every time I called them I was kind of like, "Hey, what did you do? What helped you?"

And I was trying to find the silver bullet, but then I soon found out this is something that's going to be with you forever. I've never done counseling, support group, anything like that, but I was like, "This is totally different. I need to change maybe some things I've done before with difficult things in my life." And there wasn't a church even in my zip code. You can type in your zip code on the website, but I was like, "I just need one that's tonight." So I just looked through the list and there was one in South Georgia and I joined, but it was great.

Walter:

I'm curious, the emails, if either of you remember the type of thing that you heard or read in the emails or if there's even a specific piece of content that was short, but what you needed to hear at the time?

Adam:

I think it was just helpful to have the time dedicated to reading something because my job at the time was pretty crazy, family being at home with COVID. It was kind of a tough time, but it was that one little space. It was super short, so it allowed me to take some time and not just continue to push it under the rug, so let me deal with it daily. And it also just felt like catered towards exactly what I was going through. It knew exactly my feelings, my thoughts and everything. So super helpful.

Walter:

And particularly when so many other people you're interacting with are not in that space, right?

Adam:

Yeah, absolutely.

Walter:

Those emails are like, "Hey, you're not alone."

Erin:

Yeah, I would very much agree with that. I can't remember one specific email, but I just remember having trouble processing all of the different emotions that I was feeling and really even identifying what I was feeling or what I was experiencing. And it was just really helpful because I would get this email and some days it wasn't very applicable, but other days I would say, "That is spot on. That's exactly what I'm feeling right now." But I needed somebody else to help me identify that.

Anne:

How did y'all get involved in Grief Share and starting it here at Westside?

Erin:

Adam and I were in the same Grief Share group. I think we had both benefited so much from Grief Share that we just wanted to be able to continue that and provide that opportunity for other people. And then I know I personally also wanted to continue processing my own grief. Every time someone shares, there's something new that comes out of that. And I remember even the last group that I helped to facilitate, one of the participants, who had also lost her father, was sharing about him and the role that he played in her life. And it helped me make some connections that I really hadn't made before that about why I was triggered by certain things. And I don't know whether I'll ever really get to the core of it, but...

Adam:

I think for me, the more I talk to others and hear stories, the more I'm encouraged and strengthened. I think it's easy at times to hide in a situation when you're experiencing grief. It's easy to run away from it, go to work, your friends, your family, push it off. But for me it was kind of like a fork in the road, right? I can either go one way and I can dive deep into it and I can learn more and try to get closer to God and just see maybe what's happening. Or you can just not talk about it, keep going on with life and just stuff it a little bit. I'm glad I went the one way and I just kind of dove right in. And like I said, Grief Share was super helpful.

Anne:

Something you said a minute ago, Erin, too makes me think too, I think when you lose people that are close to you, there's a fading of that memory of that person that's inevitable. I think that's why we're made for eternity. And so there's just this sadness to the fact that you don't get to interact with them or you don't meet people that know them necessarily all the time. It occurred to me as you were speaking with this other person that lost their father as well, that it's an opportunity to remember them.

The man that led my Grief Share group the first time was saying that, "Grief can feel like a wave." And he said, "Lean into the wave. You think you're going to be swallowed by the wave, and so you want to run from it." But he's like, "If you lean into it and it crashes over you, you see you're still standing, you're still there. Or even if you've fallen on the ground, it's okay. You're not swept up by it, but you're able to grow through it." And so I'm just curious, what other areas of your life perhaps, how is your soul enlarged by leaning into that grief? Or how have you seen in unexpected ways the Lord meet you and bless you by staying in the process of it?

Erin:

I feel like I have really learned to lament through this process of grieving, and I grew up thinking that as a Christian, we're always supposed to be joyful and God is working all things for good for those who love him. And so we shouldn't be sad, or if we are, we should be happy again very soon. There are just some things in life that are so overwhelmingly sorrowful that it's just appropriate to acknowledge that. The thing that has really stuck with me the most and that was the most comforting to me that I think Grief Share really drew this out, the ways in which God himself understands our grief, he understands our sorrows. Even the passage where he goes to the Tomb of Lazarus. And God incarnate, he knows he's going to raise this man from the dead, and yet he weeps in the face of this death of his friend and the extreme pain that his friends are enduring because of that death is so significant. We live in this broken world. No one understands that better than God himself.

Anne:

What about you, Adam?

Adam:

I think for me, reaching out to others that are experiencing grief. I think before I never really knew what that was like. So I would have friends that maybe parents passed away or whatever and just would say, "Hey, I'm thinking about you," right? "Praying about you," but never really kind of followed up with them or I had deep conversation, but now kind of going through exactly what they're going through, I think I have more of a heart for that. So when that happens, just reaching out to people and really trying to see if they need someone to talk to. One thing I've learned is everyone deals with grief differently, right? So you're going to have someone that's going to want to, "Yes, let's talk as much as you want to." That was me. I just wanted to talk to anyone, and the more I talked about, the better I felt, the more I could process it.

Walter:

Erin, I'll ask you this. Who is Grief Share for? And then what's it like to show up to a Grief Share meeting? What is it to do when you're together?

Erin:

Grief Share is for anyone who is processing the loss of a loved one. It is specific to the death of someone you love. Other than that, it's really open to anyone. We have had people who've come to the group, many people who've come to the group who were not part of Westside. We've also had people who are not Christians who have come to the group. It's really an amazing way to minister to people in our community. I've been surprised by the lack of support groups in general for grief, in terms of what it's like to show up.

I was very nervous showing up to the first group. I wondered what it was going to be like, what other people were going to be, what sort of grief they were going to be processing. I thought it might be awkward. I feared that it might actually make things worse because I didn't really want to talk about my grief. It can be very uncomfortable, I think, to come to the first meeting. But I found very quickly that it was a safe space, a place where I could share and a place where I really felt understood.

Walter:

So you gather together. Is there some content that you talk about? Or if you don't want to share, do you have the freedom to be quiet?

Adam:

Yeah, absolutely. No pressure to talk, so you can just come, you can learn. There's a video that you'll watch that gives you some coping tools, goes through some content. You also have a workbook that you do on your own, which I really appreciated because again, it just gives you that space to make sure that you're processing it. Has a lot of good questions that maybe you wouldn't have thought of potentially as well.

Walter:

And people sometimes go more than once?

Adam:

Yeah, so I've been to six groups. I've led a few of those. But yeah, I think it's been cool too. Every group, right, has different people and different stories.

Walter:

And how does one find a group, whether at Westside or somewhere else in the city?

Erin:

There's a website. It is griefshare.org. Anyone can go to the website. You can find lots of helpful resources on the website. You can sign up for the daily emails that we mentioned, and you can also search by your city or zip code to find groups that are meeting. And there are lots of local churches of all different denominations that host Grief Share.

Walter:

And I just searched it today and there are lots of groups that are meeting right now around the metro Atlanta area. And Westside, if you all are hosting one, we don't know when you're going to be listening to this podcast, but if you're curious about this, pull it up and you might even find one at our very own Westside.

Anne:

Well, thank you all so much for being with us this afternoon and also just sharing your stories with grief. There's a new normal that we all enter into when we've lost somebody, and there's also this school of suffering, this comradery with people that mourn with those that mourn. And so I consider that with you all. Thank you so much.

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